


Scaring 101, for Women

by TheColorBlue



Category: Monsters University (2013)
Genre: Cold War, F/F, workplace inequality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 11:03:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abigail Hardscrabble is one of fifteen women in Monster University's incoming freshman class of 205 scaring majors. The year is 1948.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scaring 101, for Women

It is 1948, and in Abigail Hardscrabble’s incoming freshman class of 205 scarers at Monsters University, there are fifteen women. 

Abigail is eighteen years old. She is six feet eight inches, and expects that she will be roughly three times that height by the time she has reached the mature age of fifty. Fifty is not old, for a monster of her type. At fifty, she would be at her prime. She’s on a time clock. Professional scarers have a strict height regulation, given that human doors on average are only six and a half feet. A scarer must be able to fit through a door and he, or she, must be able to maneuver easily through a human child’s bedroom without touching the child’s toxic belongings, or causing property damage to the human structural dwelling. Abigail has read all the textbook material on professional restrictions and regulations. She already has two strikes against her. She will have a short career on account of her rate of growth. She will have possibly no career at all, on account of her being a female. 

It is 1948, and the humans are threatening each other with nuclear armaments. For most monsters, radioactivity is probably not much of a problem, or at least not a lethal problem. Humans, on the other hand, and for all the toxicity of their bodies, are also surprisingly fragile. They are like particularly beautiful, delicate, poisonous fish in coral reefs. Small degrees of change could endanger an entire species. One nuclear bomb could wipe out swathes of the human population. 

Those monsters working in energy management and scaring are making contingency plans. There is a possibility of energy shortages in the near future, in the case of human nuclear war. Scarers must be prepared to tackle these problems creatively. 

Eventually, that is what gives Abigail the idea of the annual Scare Games; she wants to use it as a way to elevate the status of the campus’s female scarers, but she proposes it as a competition to prepare scarers for new problem-solving situations in the human world. 

This is towards the end of her freshman year, and on the weekend before the formal proposal is submitted, she is embroiled in heavy and angry rhetoric about a male dominated scaring profession while in Eta Hiss Hiss’s sorority house. Eta Hiss Hiss is MU’s oldest and only all-scarer sorority. Abigail rails against workplace inequality. Her sorority sisters, Yolanda and Yasmine and Yolie, a three-headed bird-lizard, sits on the other side of the fireplace and embroider EHH’s Greek letters on new blouses for themselves and Abigail. Abigail and all the other girls will be going to the Dean of Scaring to submit their proposal regarding the competition. Abigail mutters choice words about how someday she WILL be the dean, and will create scholarships for female scarers, and extract female-specific internship contracts from Monsters Incorporated, the top scaring facility in the country. 

Yolanda asks Abigail if she’d like to take a break for coffee and the leftover bacon and cheese biscuits. 

Abigail huffs, still in the middle of her diatribe, and then she says all right. 

She looks at the blouse and then stiffly compliments her sorority sisters on their dexterity with a needle. 

Yolanda also demands a kiss, which she gets, pecked on the check. Yolanda and Abigail are dating, or whatever you would call two women together in 1948. Yasmine and Yolie are still on the fence about the situation, but Yolanda likes to say that they are warming up to Abigail. They all have their own opinions. Yolie eats most of the biscuits over coffee that afternoon. Yasmine wonders out-loud if they will be allowed to use the university’s extensive sewer network for the games. 

It is a good partnership. 

They are all waiting for the opportunity to wipe the floor with the university’s scaring fraternities, and Abigail will never forget her first day in Scaring 101. 

In a lecture hall with the swooping ceiling of a cathedral, she is looking down on a veritable sea of men, which wouldn’t actually be bad in itself, except someone asks her if she’s lost, sounding nearly _too_ gentle, _too_ patient, as she looks down the aisles uncertainly, trying to decide where to sit. And then she’s looking into the faces of all these confident, self-assured, slightly-disbelieving or incredulous men, and…she feels lost, and afraid. She wants to crawl into her own skin. She takes the first seat she can find by the aisle, she is too big, too obviously different, and she stares down at the front of the lecture hall. She looks at all the statues of the legendary scarers from that school, and like remembering she wills herself to sit up straight, and smooth the anxiety from her face into an expression like stone, and heavy-lidded. 

She is a scarer. She isn’t afraid, she inspires fear. And when some big, strapping fellow leans over to tell her how pretty she looks, she smiles, bares her fangs, and then stands up to move to another seat. She’s finally spotted another woman in the sea of men. Or, well, three women, a three-headed monster. 

Sister scarers needed to stick together, after all; fight the good fight, and all of that sort of nonsense.


End file.
